Thank you for a short but wonderful experience! Due to time constraints and other factors, the forum is now archived and is no longer open to new registrations nor posts. All existing content can be seen for the time being. Thanks again, and I wish everyone all the best!

Please note that the forum may be permanently removed in the future, so please save any content sooner rather than later. No advance notice of this action will occur.

Creatures is an old game, and doesn't run quite normally on all modern systems, so there are about as many convoluted ways to run it and manage it as there are machines. What's yours?

Personally I have several setups, each more horrifying than the last. My current go-to is popping installs into unpatched Windows XP VMs and cloning them out when I need to do something with particularly dramatic cross-world effects (like swapping out base game catalogues) or need a clean install to test against. I also do really, really nasty things with Cygwin so I can actually write CAOS on my host machine instead of dealing with gvim inside Windows.

(This also helps in figuring out what the heck the GOG version is doing with file locations vs. retail.)

Though I would like to do more with the Linux creatures engine, I can't justify it since I'm having to bugfix against the Windows version everyone else uses anyway. I used to run inside WINE but stopped for similar reasons (also the 16-bit color issue).

I will marinate you in the GPL for 4 days and then I will roast and eat you.

Thankfully I haven't run into many problems on Win7 with the GOG versions; it's just imperative that they be installed to My Documents/Creatures/ so all the files stay together. I then set up a 16-bit color-switch so I don't have to deal with that manually. After that applying the Remastered Patch fixes the remaining issues, in my experience anyway. I detailed the way I set up my C3/DS here(though it's mostly lists of stuff I download, heh)

I got LC2E running on my Debian setup a while back, but it was a pain to get the sound to work and I forget all the steps I had to take to get there. There were a lot of them. If I ever have to do it again I'll try to document it better. In the end I was happy with it though, and it was fun being able to write scripts to talk to the engine without dealing with the shared memory horror show.

Getting LC2E running is an ... adventure, yeah. (An adventure that for me tends to hinge on a single unrelated wiki page still being online and up-to-date.) Eventually I'd like to get around to documenting the process myself, and keeping track of the relevant archaic library builds one of these days as that's the sort of data that tends to disappear without warning.

I had a 16-bit autoswitch set up (frustratingly hand coded, glad someone else had the same idea and made a util for it) eeeeons ago when I still ran DS on the metal, but with VMs it doesn't matter. I'm pretty unhappy with color settings becoming more and more tucked out of the way though, in OSX there is no longer a GUI control for it (and I have yet to find the terminal control; DisplayMaestro is the only thing that's reliably worked). Mostly the fancy 32-bit shadow and fade effects forced on UIs these days just give me a headache.

I will marinate you in the GPL for 4 days and then I will roast and eat you.

OSX X11 (XQuartz) actually has a nifty 16 bit mode built in which will run on top of your regular millions of colors desktop (woohoo!). With Wineskin, it's as simple as 1-2-3:https://creatures.wiki/Creatures_on_OS_X_Tutorial.... everyone can play on OSX again . This also means running Windows C3/DS on an equivalent version of wine w/ a 16 bit util on Linux should be totally fine !

I've recently bought a new PC which uses the 64-bit version of Windows 10. Unfortunately when I try to load and run Creatures 2, either nothing happens, or I get a registry error. So far I've tried setting the Compatibility Wizard to Windows Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8, all on 16-bit colour. I can't get the game to work at all. Can someone advise me how I can solve this problem, please, because I miss the game?

AGLDA01, your question might fit better in the Questions and Answers section, but can I ask what version of Creatures 2 you are running? (The original from the CD, Albian Years, GoG Albian Years, etc) If you're not running GoG Albian Years, I would highly recommend it as it's been updated to work with newer systems. Though if you're on Windows 10 you may still have to wrestle with the Black Box of Doom. Sigh, the never-ending perils of getting ancient games to run on new systems.